Hannah Lantos

Hannah Lantos

Research Scientist, Bethesda, MD

Areas Of Expertise

Education & Certification

Ph.D., Public Health, Johns Hopkins University

Hannah Lantos, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist in the Youth Development research area at Child Trends. She recently graduated with her Ph.D. in Public Health with a focus on social and behavioral trends in adolescent health from Johns Hopkins University. Her Ph.D. dissertation explored the associations between adolescents’ experiences of community-level violence with sexual behavior in both Baltimore and Johannesburg. This work not only analyzed the relationship between non-sexual violence and sexual health but also compared adolescents in two low-income settings. Her work more generally explores how the social and physical environments that adolescents live in affect their health and how context shapes the choices available for adolescents as they learn about and try to engage in healthy decision-making. She has worked with both large, national datasets and small, evaluations and with both quantitative and qualitative data. Before her work at Johns Hopkins, she worked primarily in international settings. She received a Masters of Public Administration in International Development, after time spent working in the Middle East and Northern Africa and in sub-Saharan Africa. During that time, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Zambia and studied and worked on projects on microfinance, girls’ education, education quality, women’s employment, and partner communication in Zambia, Egypt, northern Africa, and Mozambique. She is passionate about applied, multidisciplinary research on adolescent health, well-being, and positive development.